Archive for March, 2006

There is a war being fought over the future of digital technology and there is a serious reason for conflict. You see, computers allow people to copy things, and digital copies are always perfect. You can make as many copies as you want. In the past you would could buy a high quality version of something like a DVD. Only one person could use this DVD at a time. You could lend the DVD to another person and get it back a week later, but that meant you would not have it in the meantime. Copying, by necessity, was limited. But this has changed. With digital technology you can give a perfect digital copy of a movie to ten million people at zero cost, and still keep the original for yourself.

If people can share an infinite amount of digital products zero cost, there is no reason for people to pay for such products. This has the potential to turn the economic foundation of publishing on its head. Sharing information takes on a whole new meaning in the digital realm.

The traditional publishers want to prevent people using technology to copy things and are promoting a restrictive system called Digital Rights Management (DRM). These people believe that the Internet and the PC are a threat to the economic foundation of publishing media. They believe that if they don’t find a way to regulate how people use computers, their revenue streams will cease to exist. They say that they need to be able to prevent the copying of copyrighted work.

Other groups of people insist that sharing is important, and rejects DRM because it means allowing private companies to have control over personal computers. These people believe that networked and free communication is empowering the disenfranchised. They believe that people will pay for things legitimately most of the time and that the traditional publishers want to encroach on an area of personal freedom that goes against both the precedent of law and of copyright history. They say that people have always had the choice to obey or disobey copyright law and the onus is on the publisher to prove breaches of copyright.

Microsoft, Intel, Apple and the entire music and movie industry of the USA stand on one side and thousands of programmers, technology organisations and academics on the other. Both sides have something important to say, and both sides are refusing to listen to the other.

Over 500 million people use the Internet, and over a billion computers are in use around the world. It has become impossible to ignore the issue of content management and access. Call it Digital Rights Management (DRM), if you will, or call it working out how to manage copying in the digital realm. We need to solve the problem of how digital information will be shared and equally importantly, we need to set open and wide reaching standards. It has been more than ten years since computers and the Internet really started to take off, and there is still no coherent approach to restricted (or unrestricted) information sharing. This is a serious problem.

Let’s have a look at the history.

In 1994 there was a new buzzword in computer magazines. It was “multimedia.” Users were told a revolution was coming. We would have pictures, video and sound on every desktop. Microsoft heralded this revolution with the introduction of their advanced new operating system called Windows 95, IBM pointed out that they already had a great 32bit system that could do multimedia with OS/2 and Apple cheerfully reminded everyone that they had a multimedia machine in deployment since the mid-eighties.

By 1995 the Internet was beginning to take off. Modems were falling to price levels that made sense and more websites started to appear. By 1996 the tech crowd were pretty advanced, and by 1997 the web was finally entering the lives of everyone. Companies like Amazon.com appeared, and everything changed.

No one expected the Internet to become so big so quickly. No one could have predicted the extent to which digital technology would enter the fabric of everyday life, especially in the economic sphere. Far from proving to be an extension of the existing market space, the digital world became an economy in its own right. Computers became an inescapable and essential part of everyday life. Costs plummeted and power soared. Multimedia changed from being a novelty to being a normal product.

By around 1998 there were millions of people with the ability to view and share many different forms of digital content. The only major problem was a lack of content to actually share. DVDs were too big to squeeze down modem lines, and music files were still substantial in size. Pictures were about the only thing that most people could share.

Technology advanced. Real Networks developed a good way to make small sound files with high quality, and then MP3 appeared and gave everyone the ability to share as much music as they wanted. Even over a modem it was possible to download an entire album in a couple of hours. File sharing networks appeared, and new social networking groups formed around them. Napster created software that literally allowed anyone to find the music they liked, and download it with one click.

A floodgate of community sharing was opened. New networks appeared, new methodologies were introduced, but the essential idea remained the same: create a simple network that allowed lots of people to share lots of files. This innovation apparently caught the publishing industry completely by surprise. No major publishing house had invested in the development of a commercial digital distribution network, and the first one to appear with a usable interface was Apple’s iTunes in 2001. It is ironic that when millions of people wanted to share information, the only way they could do so easily was through free file sharing networks.

By the time the music, movie and text publishing industry began to actively engage with the emerging technology, file sharing was already an accepted method of providing multimedia information. It might have been a free method, and it might have been a method that largely ignored copyright, but file sharing was the method that most people used to get most of their files. Millions of people shared billions of files. Even today file sharing accounts for over 60% of the traffic on the Internet. A significant amount of this traffic is illegitimate.

Technology allows sharing. People are sharing files. These files included copyrighted music, films, books and software. Companies say revenue is being lost because of file sharing, and that something needs to be done. The question is “what needs to be done?”

Should governments stop people sharing? They already do. It’s called copyright law. According to this, only the original creator of a work has the right to determine who makes a copy of this work, and what is done with the copy. This law is applicable to books that you can hold, and books on your computer. It applies to music, movies and software. But companies say that this law is not enough. Because of the power of technology, and the ability of the user to share copies so easily and so extensively, companies say that stronger measures are required to protect their copyrighted material.

This is where we get DRM. Digital Rights Management is about restricting how and when people can use copyrighted files. It may restrict how many times you can play something. It may restrict your ability to share something. It may restrict the method you employ to consume something. It is about allowing companies to determine how the end user will experience the copyrighted material that the end user purchased.

The biggest buzzword in DRM right now is ‘Trusted Computing’. This is about creating a way for companies to trust your computer with their copyrighted material (rather than anything to do with consumers trusting their computers). For several years Intel have been included a ‘Trusted Computing’ encryption chip on motherboards, and when Windows Vista is released it will support this framework. For the first time there will be a very solid and secure way for a publisher to determine if your machine has the right to play their copyrighted material. When you try to play a movie, it will check with their server to see if your Trusted Computer has the correct permissions. If you attempt to run an illegitimate file, your computer will refuse. No matter what you do, a chip on your motherboard will refuse to cooperate.

This is a very strange approach to copyright enforcement. It means that when you buy a copyrighted file, you don’t actually have the permission to use it. Your computer has the permission. The file won’t work on another computer, or your mobile phone, or your PDA, or your heavily modified XBOX. It’s a bit like selling a person a book, but designing it so that people cannot read it in the bath (or in the garden or in the kitchen). Instead of finding a way to stop the end user giving illegitimate copies of a work to other people, this type of DRM is about controlling the right to copy work for any purpose, and in the process it determines the end user consumption method and options as well.

Objections abound. That’s where all the thousands of programmers, technology organisations and academics come in. They are saying that ‘Trusted Computing’ and the entire methodological approach currently being suggested by industry heavyweights is a grossly unfair attempt to extend copyright law. The proposed DRM system would control every aspect of a person’s private digital life. This is unprecedented. There has never been an occasion when producers could control how people use their possessions.

There are so many voices. Some people say industries will collapse if we don’t have DRM. Some people say industries are too greedy and asking for too much. Some people say sharing data will help advanceand promote culture. Some people say that finally we are getting a world where everyone can have access to everything that is beautiful, useful or interesting. There is a cacophony of comment. Ideas are swirling around and mixing together. The result is an enormous and confusing mess.

The truth is that we are in an unusual situation. A completely new technology has appeared and this technology makes obsolete previously established technologies and the industries associated with them. Music is better digitally, and suddenly CDs and tapes and records belong to yesteryear. Films are the same. Purely digital copies on purely digital media are simply more flexible, useful and effective than those tied to traditional media. Books, magazines and newspapers are in the same boat. People with a lot of money and influence are feeling threatened, but their perception of the problem is perhaps too selfish to allow for a true understanding of what’s happening.

The network for communicating certain media has shifted because of the introduction of revolutionary technology. The paradigm of media consumption has changed, and we are lacking a new discourse to explain it. Our copyright laws and processes, our market definitions and our consumer expectations were designed before this technology was conceived. To make matters worse, a formal approach to understanding the new paradigm has been effectively impossible due to the rapid changes and evolution of digital desktops and the Internet. Thus instead of a sustained worldwide academic understanding of the emerging new digital world, we have ended up with a discourse primarily conducted by interest groups, while the slower moving world of journals and research has lagged behind. The danger is that instead of seeking and finding an understanding of these new technologies, end users will find themselves permanently disenfranchised by those who wish to profit or control the digital sphere. This situation is not helped by the level of confusion that has been created and sustained on personal, governmental and international levels.

Even the legal process has become a problem regarding the issue of DRM and intellectual property. On one hand laws are meant to protect people and companies, and on the other hand law is a restrictive influence. In countries like the USA, the law regarding the new communicative paradigms has been abused to provide virtual monopolies over the ideas needed to utilise technology. Wide-ranging patents have been granted on abstract ideas. Purchases are being removed from ownership (you don’t own the software you buy, you just license it). Copyright infringement is being pushed from a civil infringement to a criminal action.

Fear abounds. Fear breeds compliance. Compliance breeds acceptance. Acceptance means control. The companies who create DRM in the form of ‘Trusted Computing’ (Intel, Microsoft, Apple), and the companies that own the content (EMI, Sony), will control the digital revolution. Imagine a world where our computers actually belong to these multinationals. It is an unappealing thought.

Worse still, governments will be disenfranchised along with citizens. Networks will be needed, but not controlled by the nations that host them and the content will be monitored by proxy, with companies working for private shareholders. That’s not just an unappealing thought. It’s untenable.

We are back to the question of “what needs to be done?” It’s a tough one. DRM is not really about making sure you don’t steal music. DRM is about attempting to create a completely new way of controlling how people use information and in doing so it is about attempting to force corporate control into what was previously a very private sphere. This is the solution that companies wish to impose. It is not necessarily the solution your grandchildren will be glad you accepted.

We need to carefully examine how digital technology and the Internet has changed the way that people consume different types of media. We need to examine how current copyright law controls access and sharing across different nations. We need a long consultation process to discuss how we could form international standards of maintaining copyright in a reasonable way without infringing on the rights of end users or content producers. In short, we need to produce a new discourse to explore this paradigm, and we need to do so from first principles.

That is going to be a long and difficult process and to be successful, we’re all going to have to talk to each other. We’re going to have to share all our problems, concerns and aspirations. Businesses, legal experts, users, governments and technologists will have to work together to find a new way to approach publishing, information access and information control. No one group can be allowed to hijack this consultation process. Democracy demands nothing less and rightly so. The generations of the future will suffer or benefit from the end result of the legislation we are now just beginning to develop.

Tonight was a rather long one for little old me. I decided to get all proactive, guerrilla, and viral. I took lots of FSFE leaflets, put them together into nice little packs, and walked two kilometers to the student residences of the University of Birmingham in the UK. My goal? To put information about the FSFE and the fellowship through as many doors near the schools of politics and computer science as I could.

This strange little mission was motivated by conversations I have had with people as I tour local LUGs. Many people don’t really know what the FSFE does, or what we want to accomplish. I figured that it’s important to meet that ignorance head-on, and to get our message out to one demographic that is relatively sure to be interested. Students…you have to love them!

There was another motive. I had loads of little fellowship leaflets talking about the laptops we are giving away during April, and I wanted to get that message out to people before the deadline passed. Success. Almost all the leaflets are now gone. A handful have been retained for the Birmingham Perl Mongers meeting on Wednesday where I will wax lyrical about FSFE stuff.

Ah. My feet hurt. My back hurts. It was raining. But in my tiny, tiny, tiny way I did something that might mean more people will learn about Free Software. That is a good thing. Sometimes all the discourse and planning in the world is not as important as getting out there, and pro-actively spreading the important word.

The other day I attended a meeting of the South Birmingham Linux User Group. The meeting was held in Birmingham University in the school of computer science, and I found it a pretty comfortable setting. After all, this is the university where I did my MA.

On the day I attended there was a special talk by Professor Aaron Sloman on Artificial Intelligence. More specifically, Aaron was speaking about POPLOG and POP11, an AI development environment and the language it uses. From a technological perspective, it was a fascinating lecture.

POPLOG allows you to develop AI applications using an incremental compiler. This means it has some of the speed advantages of compiled code like C, but the flexibility of instant redevelopment and redeployment we would normally associate with interpreted languages like Java. The coolest feature was to watch Aaron writing changes to the code, seeing it compile almost instantly, and execute cleanly.

For AI development, the instant compile and execute model is particularly useful. It allows researchers to pro-actively adapt their applications to reach their overarching design goals. Because the end product of code design is compiled, it’s faster than interpreted languages, but it’s not as inflexible as tradition code.

POPLOG is not a new product. It’s been around for decades, and was even a commercial product in the nineties. It provided the original engine for a data-mining product called Clementine (the product is now ported to C++ and Java instead of using the original POP11 code). It’s a powerful system, especially for its target field, and it’s released under an open source license (Xfree86 1.0).

Hey, let’s not beat around the bush. Not everything is lovely in POPLOG land. The development environment of POPLOG looks dated. Being based around the command line instead of providing a graphical IDE makes it a bit scary for programming idiots like me. There are also problems getting POPLOG to run on all the Linux distributions. But I saw it in action, and I was impressed.

You can get instructions to help you install and run POPLOG on Debian and Ubuntu at the POPLOG main page. Best of all, there is an effort on sourceforge to develop OpenPOPLOG."

After the big talk, we wandered to Staff House and let down our hair. There was a really interesting mix of people attending, including some school students. I was impressed with those guys, and rather chuffed to hear that their school is running Red Hat! It looks like Windows is not everywhere, after all.

Hopefully I’ll make it along to future meetings. This one was certainly educational! Meanwhile, if you are anywhere near Birmingham (UK), do drop by one of the SBLUG meetings. The website is here.

SCO has (had?) one. Ciarán from FSFE has one. Now I have one too! Yes, it’s time to lock your children inside. It’s time to hide behind the sofa. Shane has a roadshow.

I’m on a one-man mission to spread the FSFE word across the Midlands of the UK, and last night my first victim…um…I mean audience…was the Wolverhampton Linux Users Group. I used to study at Wolverhampton Uni (way back before electricity), and it was great fun to return to the city. It was even more fun to meet the people behind the LUG.

When I first turned up at Spice Avenue balti restaurant I didn’t know what to expect. Old people, young people? Happy people? Sad people? A bunch of people who would set fire to me and dump the body because I dual-boot Ubuntu and WindowsXP? As it happens, the Wovles LUG is made up of a diverse range of people with a whole variety of commercial and non-commercial interests. One thing unifying the group is that everyone is really friendly.

We ate before we did any serious talking, and it was only after stuffing myself with a nice chicken dish that I stumbled upstairs to a conference room to chat about the FSFE. I didn’t want to present too much information and bore everyone to tears, so we had a quick run-through about Free Software (as opposed to open source), the role of the FSFE, and how people can help out. Then we had a much longer section for Q&A.

During the question time a lot of interesting points were raised about DRM, trusted computing, and getting people to adopt GNU/Linux. There is some common ground about issues like DRM, but there is also a lot of worry about things like Linus’s rejection of GPLv3 draft 1. From a practical perspective, a very good point was made about GNU/Linux as a whole: until the average person walks into PC World (a large chain in the UK) and sees Linux machines there, Linux will have a lot of trouble getting to the desktop.

My favourite comment of the evening had to do with “is Linux ready for the desktop?” I suggested that for many people it’s not, and I was rightly corrected by a wise LUG member. They pointed out that if someone has never used a computer before, something like GNOME is easy to pick up. The problem is transitional users. For people used to Windows, Linux systems have a learning curve, and that is where a lot of people don’t want to put in the effort. Excellent point!

We need to engage with each other closely in the coming years. GNU/Linux is more popular than ever before, and it would be wonderful if we could keep expanding our reach. However, we need to work together on this one, drawing LUGs and Free Software Foundations and governments and businesses closer. The purely hobby years of Linux are gone, but that’s no reason to take the fun out of it. If we can all find common ground, and aim towards aspirational goals like technological provision, I believe we can make a massive difference not just to existing computer users but also to disadvantaged people around the world.

Personally, I would like to see more dialog. I’d like to see more people talking to more groups, and to make full use of all this communication technology we are sitting on. That way we can really deal with some of the issues (DRM, sustainable business models in FOSS) that are floating around.

Thank you Wolves LUG! I had great fun, and I’ll try to make it to the next meeting!

Today there was an email that I didn’t want to read. The subject said “To friends of Richard Rauch.” I sighed, and opened the message. Rob, Richard’s brother, had written “I have some very bad news: Richard was riding his bicycle when he was hit by a drunk driver; he eventually died from his injuries.”

What a sad moment. Not just for Richard’s family, but for the Free Software community. Richard Rauch was a contributor to NetBSD, and gave a great deal to many people who will never even know his name. He had worked for years to make NetBSD better, and in doing so I believe he has left an important legacy. He is part of the larger Free Software world.

Free Software is a big community. In every corner of the globe people start computers every day, and they use our work. Maybe it’s GPL software, maybe it’s BSD software (like what Richard worked on). Maybe it’s MPL. Maybe it’s something else. But it’s out there. What a wonderful accomplishment this is. It’s something quite unheard of. People like Richard have united in a fantastic mission to bring technology to everyone.

The very thought that someone can have a computer with software as good (or better) than commercial products without any restrictions is breath-taking.

Yes, we are doing so well. But Richard is dead. As many of us as there are, the loss of Richard has upset me. He was a pillar in his particular FOSS community. He will surely be missed.

I’m glad that many discussions are appearing around DRM. I think there is a lot that needs to be said on this subject, and it’s our duty to be at the forefront of this process. One way or another, DRM will have a huge effect on the entire digital sphere in the coming months and years. This blog entry is a very interesting read. I don’t agree with all the points, but I think you raise some legitimate concerns. One of the clearest messages in your article is that DRM – as currently appearing in things like trusted computing chips – has the real and scary potential to take away end user freedom. In this sense you are absolutely right that DRM is a weird and unacceptable thing, because it basically involves allowing companies to decide how we live our lives.

The one thing I want to raise is that you equate the "trusted chip" (trusted computing) with DRM. Trusted computing in this form is not DRM. It is a method of applying DRM. Digital Rights Management can be anything related to digital rights management. Trusted chips are an important technology, and one that is already on many computers, but it’s just one technology. I think your article is in danger of confusing trusted computing chips with DRM itself (a confusion of concept and implementation).

Linus Torvalds does not claim that you would want to use exactly the same technology to protect your diary. He is saying that fundamentally the same technology is used for both personal protection and DRM. To quote, he said the "basic technology is about encryption, public and private keys and so on." I guess that if we can fault him for anything, it’s for being too general. Perhaps this is because he made it pretty clear he wants to keep clear of dictating the implementation of DRM. Again, to quote him: "I don’t want to make my software be "activist." I try to make it technically as good as possible and let that part speak for itself. I don’t want it to make politics."

Gosh, this is a heated topic. There is a good reason for it being heated: if DRM is indeed allowed in the form that many companies want, we’ll lose freedoms we have enjoyed for generations. On the other hand, if we don’t work out some way for businesses to sell digital goods without losing their market after shipping a couple of copies, economics problems will appear. We have to discuss and discuss this issue, and look at it from all sides.

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I think DRM is really going to be the big word in the coming nine months. Web 2.0, Windows Vista, UMPC…these are small things compared to the confusion around how we are going to control (or free) our digital futures. Without the painful process of creating coherent policy around this subject we will not advance as digital societies.

Some day my fridge will be connected to my laptop, and that’ll speak to my car. This is great because it means no more surprises regarding running out of milk or gas, but I don’t want anyone hacking in (pro digital rights management). That does not mean I want EMI to tell me what music I will listen to over breakfast (against digital rights management). It’s a difficult topic.

For the record, let’s not forget about software patents. I’m pretty worried about them too.